Pear Oatmeal Coffee Cake

This Pear Oatmeal Coffee Cake is the perfect “any time of day cake” – for breakfast with coffee, as a treat after lunch, and/or as a dinner dessert or late night snack. Vanilla scented cake topped with juicy pears and crisp oatmeal, it’s a favorite for us year round!

Lately, whenever I bake, I try to think of a sweet treat that can be eaten anytime of day. I mean, technically you can eat anything you want anytime you want, but you know what I mean, ha! And this Pear Oatmeal Coffee Cake checked all the marks for me.

As a family of two (my husband and I), desserts also have to be on the smaller side, and I am always inspired by my friend Christina over on Dessert for Two. Her site focuses on small batch recipes and for couples and small families, they always are my go to.

I wanted to take a cake recipe that I could cut in half and bake in a loaf pan, because I knew I’d want to bake something new in two days and that’s where this recipe started out with. Plus, two overripe pears were yelling at me from my kitchen counter, “you forgot about us, how dare you!?”, so to quiet them down, I thought pear + vanilla + oatmeal would be a good combination.

It’s a twist on my Dominican Cake recipe, but with a lot more moisture and a different flavor profile. For this recipe, you make a batter alongside a topping and bake until golden brown.

During this time when ingredients are scarce and maybe you might not have pears yelling at you at home, so you can totally substitute the pears for: apples, bananas, kiwi, pineapple, or even pomegranate! This is a great base recipe that you can adapt to whatever you have at home. For this recipe, I used green Anjou pears, which are refreshingly sweet and juicy with a hint of citrus and in season October – July. Check out this page all about pear varieties that I found via USA Pears (not sponsored, I just think this is useful information).

Note also this recipe only uses ONE EGG. This to me is critical as I tend to not buy a ton of eggs at a time and whenever I see a recipe that calls for anything over four eggs, I am certainly not giving myself that luxury, ha!